Weaves of Ashes

Chapter 582: Chapter 577: Not Her

Location:Loam Hollow, and the Suhe fork

Date/Time:11 Infernorest 9943 AZI, Grindday

Realm:Lower Realm

The kitchen still smelled of it in the morning, green and bitter under the bread, and the trough stood by the door scrubbed out again, with a dark line round the inside that no amount of sand was going to shift.

Meifen of First Company had been home two nights and had not yet opened the box. After breakfast she brought it out.

There had been no point before. There was now.

Two things in it. A dozen spirit crystals, each the size of a thumb joint, pale and faintly warm, packed in sawdust. And a stoppered jar of pills from Daishan’s own furnace at Kaelport, high grade, each one wrapped in paper with a number written on it.

”You don’t take these the way a clan does.” Meifen put a card down beside the jar, written out in the fair round hand, with the doses on it. ”One every ten days. Never two. You write the day on this card when you take one, and if anything feels wrong, you stop, and you send to Tiller’s Row. Eden wrote that card. Nobody in the corps takes a pill any other way, and you won’t either.”

Her mother picked up one of the crystals and turned it in the light.

”You hold one of those when you sit to cultivate,” said Meifen. ”Morning and evening. It gives you something to draw on besides the air in this valley, which hasn’t got much in it. You’re Sparkforged now. That’s where you stand. These are so you don’t just stand there.”

Her father looked at the box for a long time.

”What did this cost you?”

”At cost,” said Meifen. ”That’s the arrangement. Every soldier’s family goes on the roll, and nobody comes off it.” She did not tell him what at cost had come to against a major’s pay. He would have tried to give it back.

***

The sachets were the problem, and she had known they would be from the day she packed them.

Twenty. Four were for the family: two had gone into her parents, and two were for her brother and his wife that evening, and she did not regret one of them. That left sixteen. One sachet is one bath for one person, and Loam Hollow has a hundred and ninety-six.

Sixteen.

Meifen sat in her mother’s kitchen later that morning with the sachets on the table in front of her and did the thing she had spent four days deciding not to do, which was to make a list.

Old Mullen at the top of the valley, who had been coughing since before Meifen left and was coughing still, which is the whole of the diagnosis anybody up there has ever needed. Two of the Tolley children. A man called Wend whose leg had never healed and whom nobody had expected to see another winter in three consecutive years.

Seven names, and then she stopped and sat with the list.

Then she went out and found her father in the yard.

”I want you to hand these out.”

”They are yours.”

”They’re not mine. They’re the corps’, and I don’t live here any more.” She put the sachets into his hands, all sixteen, and did not let go of them straight away. ”If I do it, then every house that doesn’t get one got turned down by me. By me. And I’ll still be the one who turned them down in thirty years, and I won’t be here to be anything else.”

”And if I do it.”

”Then they got them off you, and you live here.”

Her father stood in his own yard with sixteen sachets in his arms.

”Who,” he said.

”You know who better than I do. I have been gone.” She held the list out — and then, after a moment, folded it in half and put it back in her coat. ”You know who.”

***

Her brother came up from the mill on the third evening with his wife and the baby, because Meifen had sent word that morning and had not said why.

He looked at the trough in the middle of the kitchen floor, and at his father, who was standing straighter than he had stood in ten years, and at his mother, who had already told half the valley about the buckets and denied it to the other half, and did not need anything explained to him.

”Both of you,” said Meifen. ”One after the other. And then her.”

The baby, she meant. Her brother’s wife understood that a moment before he did, and her arms went tight round the child.

”She’s five months old.”

”It isn’t the same for her.” Meifen untied the bundle of small sachets and laid it open on the table. Twelve, each half the size of the others, sewn in white. ”These are made for babies. Gentle. Nothing comes out of her, because there’s nothing in her yet to come out. It opens her channels a little wider than she was born with and keeps them open while she grows. One a month, for a year. Warm water, not hot, and no longer than it takes to sing her one song.”

Her brother went first, because his wife would not go until she had seen it done.

It went through him as it had gone through their father, black and rank and long, and he gripped the sides and swore at the ceiling in a steady low voice the whole way, and their mother told him to mind his language in front of the child, and he said a great deal more. Then he went through, and stopped swearing, and sat there with his mouth open.

His wife lasted longer than any of them and did not say one word from the first heat to the last. When it was over, she climbed out with the black running off her arms and wrapped herself in the sheet her mother-in-law had been mending for two years, and stood dripping on the kitchen floor, and looked at her own hands.

Then the baby.

Warm water in the small basin, the first of the little sachets, and Tam lowered into it by her mother, who would not let anybody else do it, until only her face was above the water. She startled at the warmth and drew breath to object, and then did not. Meifen put one fingertip very lightly against the inside of the tiny wrist and felt for the fire.

It was barely there. A spark at Entry Ashborn, the size every child on this continent is born with, so small she had to hold her own breath to find it.

It did not cross anything. It was not meant to. It steadied, and brightened a little, and the channels around it eased open like a fist easing open in sleep, and stayed open. The baby yawned enormously in the green water and went to sleep in it.

Nobody in the kitchen said anything for a while.

It was her father who did, in the end. He was standing by the hearth with his arms folded and his straight back, looking at his granddaughter asleep in a basin.

”Every one of us started at the bottom,” he said. ”My father. Me. Your mother. You, till you were twenty-two and had to do it badly in front of people.” His voice went somewhere and came back. ”Every one of us in this family, as far back as anybody can count. Not her.”

”Not her,” said Meifen.

Her brother’s wife was crying without any sound, with the baby back in her arms and wrapped in a towel. Her brother sat down on the kitchen floor in his wet shirt, as if his legs had decided it for him, and put his face in his hands. Their mother had both hands pressed over her mouth.

”What do we owe you?” her brother asked, through his fingers.

”Nothing.” Meifen tied the bundle of small sachets up again and put it into his wife’s hands. ”You owe her eleven more, on the first of every month, and you don’t skip one because the hay’s in.”

***

The books sat on the table for a day and a half before anybody touched them.

Meifen had carried them for four days and had not thought the thing through, which she worked out on the second morning watching her mother move them twice to lay the table and put them back afterward, squared to the edge, as you handle a thing you have decided is valuable and do not understand.

There is nobody in Loam Hollow who reads.

There had never been. Her grandfather could work a tally and so can her father, and that is the whole of the literacy of that valley and always has been, and Meifen had learned in a schoolroom at the Academy at twenty-two, badly and late and in front of people, and had not once thought about what that meant for a shelf.

On the third afternoon she sat down with the four of them.

Then she found the Tolley boy, who was eleven, and who had followed her at thirty paces for most of that morning and would not be talked to, and put them into his hands, and told him they were his, and that nobody was going to teach him, and that there was a woman at the mill who had been in service at Suhe as a girl and might have had some of it once and might not, and that this was the whole of what Meifen could do about it from four days away.

”What if I cannot.”

”Then they sit in your house till somebody can,” said Meifen. ”They keep. That’s what they’re for.”

***

She put the other thing to her father that night, because she had been carrying it for four days and had run out of better moments.

”There’s a school at the bottom of the mountain. Takes them at six, out at fifteen. No fee. No indenture. Nobody puts a mark on anything.”

Her father set the awl down.

”That’s four days’ walk and nine years.”

”It is.”

”Who gets the hay in?”

”Not the six-year-olds.” She let that sit exactly as long as it needed to. ”I’ve done it. Fourteen households in this valley have a child between six and nine. You’d lose fourteen pairs of hands that aren’t any good yet and get them back at fifteen able to read a contract before they sign it.”

”We don’t sign contracts.”

”You sign one every time a factor comes up that track and you take his word for the weight.” Meifen did not raise her voice, because she had watched better officers than her lose an argument by raising it. ”And they cultivate. Every year. From the first day, braided through the rest of it, not instead of it. That’s not me saying so. That’s the arrangement.”

Her father was quiet for a while.

”You went at twenty-two.”

”I did. Badly, and late, and in front of people.” She found she had said it flatly and let it stand. ”I’m not doing that to a six-year-old when there’s a door open.”

”And if the valley says no.”

”Then the valley says no, and I’ll come back next year and ask again.” She got up. ”But the Tolley boy goes. He’s got four books he can’t read. I gave them to him this afternoon knowing exactly how cruel that was, and if nobody in this valley sends anybody, I’ll walk him down there myself and tell his mother after.”

”You will not.”

”No,” Meifen agreed. ”I won’t. But I wanted it said out loud so you know what it’s worth to me.”

***

She stayed four days.

A hinge got mended, badly, and she was told so. One morning she walked up to the top of the valley and stood in the place she used to stand and found it exactly as she had left it, which was both the best and the worst thing about the entire visit. She sat with her mother for one whole afternoon and said very little and was not asked to.

On the fourth day the Tolley boy was waiting at the forge when she came out.

”Can anybody do it?”

”Do what?”

”Be it,” he said, and went red to the ears, and did not run away, which she noted.

Meifen crouched down, which she can do without it being condescension, because she is not much taller than he is standing.

”They’ll take you,” she said. ”Fifteen. They don’t care who your father is, and they don’t care what you can cultivate walking in. That part’s true.”

The boy nodded, too fast.

”Now the rest of it. Four years of being told what to do by people better than you at everything. Most of it’s walking. A lot of it’s carrying. Some of it’s standing in a line while something tries to get past you and you don’t move.” She let it sit. ”It isn’t a story. Still want it?”

The boy thought about it properly, which was the answer.

”Yes.”

”Then you don’t start with the corps. You start with the school at the bottom of the mountain, at the beginning of next year, when the Emberrise intake goes in.” Meifen stood up. ”Reading first. Numbers. Cultivation done properly from the first day, not picked up late and badly like I did. You’ll be behind the six-year-olds for a season, and then you won’t be. And at fifteen you walk out of that school knowing what you’re signing, and if you still want it, you give my name at Kaelport.” She looked down at him. ”And if you change your mind before then, that’s nobody’s business, and I’ll never hear of it.”

***

Meifen left on the fifth morning before it was properly light, because there is no good way to do the other kind.

Her father walked her to the head of the track, which is three hundred paces and took a long time, and neither of them said anything until the turn.

”The sachets,” he said.

”Yes.”

”I gave out fourteen.” He was looking down the valley and not at her. ”There were sixteen, and I gave out fourteen, and I have got two in the house, and I am keeping them, and I am not going to tell you what for.”

Meifen stood on the track in the near-dark.

”That is correct,” she said.

”Is it.”

”It’s what I’d have done. That’s why you got them.” The pack went onto her shoulder, and it was a very great deal lighter than it had been coming up, and she found she did not like that as much as she had expected to. ”Keep them dry. They go off in a wet winter.”

”I know what this valley has.”

”You do.”

He put his hand on the back of her neck, once, as he used to when she was small and had done a thing he was not going to say he was pleased about.

Then he went back down to the forge, because it was nearly light and the fire had been banked all night, and Meifen went west.

***

Meifen met Bai Shu at the Suhe fork on the afternoon of the tenth day out of Kaelport, which was the later of Bai Shu’s two numbers, and neither of them remarked on it.

Bai Shu’s pack was empty. Entirely. Bai Shu had given away the pack’s own straps, to somebody, for some reason she did not offer, and had tied it with cord.

They walked about four hundred paces without either of them saying anything.

”A hundred and ninety-six people,” Meifen said eventually, ”and I had sixteen baths for them.”

”I know.”

”I have done the arithmetic for the whole province, and I am going to do it for the whole continent tonight, and I already know what the answer is.”

”I know that too.” Bai Shu adjusted the cord on her shoulder. ”My aunt asked me one thing. Not thank you. Not how long have you got. She is eighty-one, and she has been dying since I was nine, and she took one look at a jar of salve on her own table and asked whether there was going to be more of it.”

Bai Shu walked a few paces.

”And then she would not get in the water. I had six sachets and a house full of cousins, and she said she was eighty-one and had had her life and the young ones were to go first, and she said it in front of all of them so that nobody could argue with her. So I argued with her. In front of all of them. For most of an evening.” Bai Shu’s mouth went thin at the memory. ”I told her that if she did not get into that water I would carry her into it, and that I could, and she knew that I could. She got in.”

Meifen waited.

”Sparkforged. At eighty-one.” Bai Shu said it as if she still did not entirely trust the arithmetic. ”She was going to be dead by the spring. Now she has something like a hundred and twenty years in front of her, and she knows it, because I told her, and I should not have. She has a whole new life, Meifen, and she is spending the first of it as a tyrant. By the second morning she had every cousin I own out of bed at dawn and sitting cross-legged in the yard to cultivate, and she walks up and down the row with a stick. She hit my uncle with it. He is sixty.” A pause. ”I have never seen her so happy in my life.”

Meifen laughed out loud, and it surprised both of them.

”Mine had a meeting,” she said. ”The last night. All of them, at the mill, because my mother would not stop telling people about the buckets and my father lifted the anvil in front of three men who had walked up to see if it was true. They sat till past midnight.” She shook her head. ”Every child in the valley goes to the school. Not the ones who can be spared. Every one of them, six to fifteen, and they want it made a rule, written down, so nobody’s father can change his mind in a bad year.”

Bai Shu looked at her.

”My father asked who would get the hay in, and then he answered it himself. The grown ones will. Eighteen of them are stronger than they were last week, and the rest mean to be by spring, and they’ll take the work the children did and more besides. And every house is putting money into one pot to buy the farming machines from the Academy, so there isn’t one house in that valley that has to keep a child home because it’s short a pair of hands.” Meifen was quiet a moment. ”Nobody in Loam Hollow has ever put money in one pot for anything. Not a well. Not a roof. Not once.”

”Mine are doing the same,” said Bai Shu. ”I did not say so, because I thought I had imagined it.” She hitched the cord higher. ”They are all cultivating. Every one of them. People who were told their whole lives that it was for clan sons and Academy places are sitting in a yard at dawn under my aunt’s stick, and they are excited about it. They want to be stronger. For the first time in their lives, they think they can be, and they are right.” She walked on a little. ”I told my aunt there would be more salve. I walked two days back thinking about whether that was true, and I have decided that it is, and that it is our job to make it not be a lie, and I would be grateful if we did not discuss it again until we are back at Kaelport.”

They walked on.

The road under them was corps road for the last day and a half of it, cut properly, with the fall in it that does not get tired, and neither of them thought about that at all, because by then it was simply the road.